What the hell is a website for?
and what you need for an effective one.
Introduction
A website is the most basic kind of digital product and they continue to remain relevant despite all the fuss about apps. Acting as a storefront, it allows customers to interact with your business and form opinions about your brand and your product or service, much like a physical store or office but with better accessibility, scalability, and reach.
A lot of businesses today fail to capitalize on the potential of websites by not investing properly or being misled due to a lack of understanding. With all the noise on the internet, it literally pays to have a website that does its job, assuming that that job is well defined and understood.
A website is fundamentally a sales and marketing tool.
Your website has the potential to bring in a ton of revenue, it is both a sales and marketing tool; not to mention that it could also be your product itself. Businesses choose to spend a ton of money on sales representatives and marketing when websites could be scaled more for lower costs and still do the job, think of it as a sales representative who could potentially reach a thousand people at the same time. Why are we choosing to spend cheap money on something that could bring in a ton of value to the business or even completely skip it in some cases?
Common Mistakes
Probably the most common mistakes that I see are opting for cheap and easy solutions by using templates that took “website builders” literally less than a week to “customize” or completely overlooking websites by trying to do everything on social media.
By doing opting to go with cheap website builders that use templates, we‘re likely to fail to build one that meets the goals of both the business and the customer. Using templates also makes the experience of the website poor because it could lack branding and limit our content strategy since we are stuck with the capabilities of builders; not to hate on them but it’s usually a question of what we want to achieve with our website and templates are pre-made without the context of what our business needs.
Social media, on the other hand, is only part of the funnel together with your website. It’s a great tool for engagement because you’re where your customers are, but it’s not the best place to sell your product or service; your “fans” are usually not in the buying mindset when they are on social media, but it’s the best avenue to bring them into that mindset. You want to bring your customers to your website where they could get to know you better and see what you offer. Imagine this, you are a salesman in a mall and you see a group of people in a huddle(Social Media), you approach them and hand them a flyer of your best deals. Some of them are interested and they talk to you, the conversation gets better so you bring them to your store where they could see all of the products that you offer; from there they make a purchase. This is essentially how social media and websites work together, you wouldn’t bring all your products with you and try to sell them on the spot since that feels very “in your face” for your customers.
What do we need for an effective website?
Okay so we’ve talked about the mistakes, but how do we make a website that is effective?
Here are a few things:
Business understanding
To make an effective website, we need to understand and define the goals of the business. Are we going to completely sell everything on the website? Are we trying to get bookings or calls? Do we want to qualify the leads? or Do we just want to show our products? These kinds of questions would help us define features and content to have on the website so that we could build one that meets our goals. Say you need to accept payments in your physical store, you’ll need a cash register; this goes the same with the features for your website.
User understanding
We especially need to understand users in order to help them and provide a good experience with our website. What do they need to see? Where do they have to go? What kind of information do they need to have in a given moment? What are their tasks? These questions help us build a great experience and interface for our website, therefore enabling them to achieve what they want in our website and with our business. If we want our customers to dine in our restaurant, we’re going to need to provide them some eating utensils and tables.
Branding
Branding helps your customers know who you are in the sea of all things on the internet and leave your stamp in their heads. It also helps you be consistent with all your materials while differentiating yourself from your competitors. Most of all, it helps you build trust in your website; having good branding helps your customers trust that you are a legitimate business and not one of those spammy pop-up sites, it’s part of the experience. If we want our customers to trust us, we need to look legitimate, much like how restaurants need to stay clean or in theme, you wouldn’t actually expect to get Chinese food from a place that looks like a diner.
Copy
Copy is part of the content on your website and a huge part of selling. You need to speak to your customers, build more trust, help them find what they need, and of course sell to them. The copy is the equivalent of what your salesman says to your customers. By having copy that sells and helps your customers, you fulfill your business goal of selling and round out the experience in your website.
Conclusion
A website is a fantastic tool for the business if it’s made well, it’s a scalable sales and marketing tool that could be customized for your own business. It goes beyond a nice to have and could replace several real-world sales and marketing experiences. Although it requires quite a few things and a most likely a hefty investment, it pays for itself down the line when it converts well.
We didn’t talk about how to bring customers to your website but it’s equally as important, we’d have to get into that next time.
P.S. Ten & Eleven’s website is under construction.
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Thanks for reading! :)
If you have more questions or want to talk about digital products like websites or apps, feel free to reach out to me.
Email: abel@teneleven.design
or follow me on Instagram: @abelmaningas for other content.
